


Ten Kids, Four Cats, and an Octopus

by inmylife



Category: The Boyz (Korea Band)
Genre: Family, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic, bermuda line as siblings, yet another family fic from me wow is anyone surprised
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 18:16:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16202966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inmylife/pseuds/inmylife
Summary: His boys were his everything.





	Ten Kids, Four Cats, and an Octopus

**Author's Note:**

> my favorite fic trope is "mom and dad adopt the rest of the band" 
> 
> as always, there are some things in this fic i haven't experienced firsthand. if my portrayal of anything in this story is offensive or inaccurate, please let me know so i can learn and then edit accordingly. i try to do as much research as i can, but there are some things i won't be able to find on my own.

Sangyeon's days start like this. 

 

He wakes up, usually to the sound of screaming children and/or teenagers. He takes a look at his sleeping husband, who has the superpower to sleep through anything and everything. He heaves a sigh and hauls himself out of bed and mindlessly puts on clothes, most often involving a sweater. (He's a professor, you know. He has to look the part.) Then he stumbles downstairs to the kitchen, where most of his boys are certainly already awake and fighting over breakfast, and attempts to play mediator and ensure that there's enough cereal left for Jacob to snack on later. 

 

But it really wasn't always like that. Really, there were days when Sangyeon could sleep in as long as he wanted, as far-back and unreal as those days seemed now. And as exhausted as he is, he wouldn't go back to that time for the world - what he'd have to give up for that, he wouldn't give up for anything. 

 

Because his boys were his everything. 

  
  


Of course, they didn't plan on one. They had planned on, at first, two, maybe three. But things, well, snowballed, as they tend to do. 

 

It starts with Changmin. Changmin was perfect, small and happy and cute, with dimples and chubby cheeks and just the sweetest smile. It took two years for their adoption request to go through, sure, but it was all worth it the day Changmin finally got to come home to them as theirs, legally theirs. Every prospective parent's dream, was that kid. Adopted with no emotional baggage and already toilet trained? As Jacob said, they'd really hit the jackpot there. 

 

Haknyeon, their second, wasn't as easy. He was a year younger than Changmin and came into their lives a year later, and he had this bright smile and big shining eyes, but, well… he missed his mom. And his sisters. His family had died in a car crash and he, well, he was two, and still couldn't quite come to terms with the idea that his mommy wasn't coming back. So he cried. And cried. And wouldn't stop crying. And yelled. And punched Jacob. A lot. 

 

It was heartbreaking for the both of them, especially for Jacob, who'd taken leave from his job to watch the toddlers and dealt with it full-time. Changmin didn't understand why his new brother was so sad and angry all the time, and loved him entirely and enthusiastically as three-year-olds tend to do. That was its own brand of painful - the day Changmin asked, as Sangyeon was tucking him in at bedtime, why Haknyeon was so sad and why couldn't Changmin ever seem to make him happy. (Sangyeon will not lie, and admits he cried then and there.) 

 

He grew out of it as he got older, thankfully, but those first few months… they hurt. A lot. 

 

Not as much as Juyeon hurt, though. 

 

They had always planned on three, really, from the moment they let Changmin into their lives. They'd decided then and there that two wasn't enough, it really just had to be three. A caseworker named Eunbi had passed them Juyeon's file - he was Changmin's age, five at the time, and wore a Hello Kitty tee shirt in the photo they'd been given of him - and something in both their brains just clicked. 

 

The reason that they have ten kids is, really, Juyeon. If not for him, they probably would have stopped at three, and then Sangyeon wouldn't have to drive an embarrassingly shady minibus whenever all twelve of them needed to go somewhere. Not that Sangyeon regretted it for a moment. 

 

The thing with Juyeon was, well… the paper the agency had given them had left out some very important information. That is, it had failed to mention that Juyeon had two older brothers. Who were also very much in need of parents. 

 

They didn't realize anything was amiss until Juyeon had mentioned, by chance, his hyungs liking something - margherita pizza, Sangyeon thinks it was, that moment wasn't so much burned into his brain as what came after - and Sangyeon and Jacob both froze. Changmin was Juyeon's age and Haknyeon was younger, so who would Juyeon be referring to as hyungs if not…

 

When Jacob had asked, Juyeon answered like this. "Oh, Jaehyun hyung and Younghoon hyung. They both still live in one of the other houses. I miss them." 

 

"They're your…" Sangyeon had blinked at Jacob, both their stomachs dropping and ice freezing shock into their veins. 

 

"My real big brothers. From mommy and daddy, before they went away." 

 

They knew, objectively, that the foster system did that. Neither of their kids before had been in care, not really, not like Juyeon had, so they'd never once confronted this fear, not even abstractly. 

 

But Sangyeon didn't want to be the reason Juyeon was torn away from his brothers. He knew Jacob didn't either. 

 

"What do we do?" Sangyeon asked Jacob that night, in their bedroom, sheets pulled up to cover their shoulders because it was December and cold. "It hurts just to think about."

 

"I asked about them again at bedtime and he said he missed them. It's only been a week… what happens when the missing-them gets worse? Is this gonna be like with Haknyeon?" 

 

Sangyeon turned back so he could flop his head dramatically onto the pillow with a sigh. "I really, sincerely hope not." 

 

Four hours later, Jacob shook him awake with the oddest look on his face. "Sangyeon. Hyung, I've got it."

 

And that's how they became foster parents. 

 

It wasn't the most genius of solutions, really, considering that Younghoon and Jaehyun could very well never be moved or age out or be adopted by someone else, but Sangyeon and Jacob were flailing for options and somehow, eventually, this one worked. It took five adoptions in between and a lot of patience and a lot of lost sleep, but in the end… 

 

When Sangyeon tells this story to other people, he tends to jump ahead of himself. He glosses over Hyunjoon a little and skips Kevin, Eric, and Sunwoo entirely. He goes straight to Juyeon, Jaehyun, and Younghoon's happy ending. But like most happy endings, the road there was longer than they wanted it to be, and emotional. And there were other people's happy endings in between. 

 

Kevin Moon, raised bilingually and their second foster child (the first, a girl named Sakura - "explain to me why we're getting so many foreigners," Jacob said), was never intended to be permanent. None of them were. Foster care was, as Juyeon's therapist Haseul explained to them, entirely a temporary thing. 

 

(Sangyeon will only mention that he ended up keeping six more children than he'd intended to, and assumes he wins the argument-that-wasn't-one, even years later.)

 

But the thing about Kevin was that he had no one fighting for him. His mother had moved back from Canada to Korea the year before because of a divorce and had gotten terminally ill within months. With no connections and a father who wanted nothing to do with him, Kevin was placed into state custody. And he loved -  _ loved _ \- having someone who would speak English with him, and call him a name that wasn't Hyungseo (Kevin and Jacob both detested their Korean names) and bond over Western cereal. He crawled his way into their hearts and didn't leave - and when a year had passed and Kevin turned six and no one else had tried to lay claim to him, Sangyeon and Jacob filed papers.

 

Sunwoo came to them just as Sangyeon and Jacob were preparing to adopt Kevin. He was three and no stranger to moving, but he was full of life regardless; at the time, Jacob and Sangyeon had had a house full of babies, and Sunwoo was just one more toddler to look after, but once Hitomi and Yeojin left and Sunwoo didn't Sangyeon had made sure to make time for the now-youngest, and he crawled his way into Sangyeon's heart and refused to leave. His adoption had needed talking Jacob into it - "weren't we just supposed to steal the Lee kids, we already have Kevin too, Sangyeon, are you serious?" - but, well, Jacob couldn't resist for long. Toddlers are just too cute. Especially their toddlers. 

 

(Because, really, Sunwoo was already theirs. Any kid who came into their house needing a bed and a meal, no matter how long they stayed, was theirs. Sunwoo was just one of the ones they were lucky enough to keep.)

 

Eric's story, much like his personality, was a little overwhelming. At first, he was just a chatty four-year-old who knew a surprising amount about baseball and skateboarding for his age. Then, Jacob realized how much of an asset Eric was when it came to cleaning. 

 

Then, a letter from the preschool came home, saying that the teachers were worried Eric wasn't hitting his social milestones. For the second time since becoming a parent, Sangyeon felt his heart drop. 

 

So they made appointments, and they stayed up late in the night on Wikipedia, Quora, and whatever else they could find, and eventually they started taking the steps to keep Eric with them. 

 

By this point, Sangyeon had accepted to some extent that they were just going to keep acquiring children and probably none of them would be Younghoon or Jaehyun. Which is why, when he answered the phone one day with baby Wonyoung screaming in his arms, Chahee the cat making him trip over every two seconds because damn that cat was clingy, and Kevin screaming in the background that someone needed to feed the octopus - and when Sooyoung informed him over the phone that their next placement's name was Lee Jaehyun - Sangyeon's response was "thank fucking god." 

 

Their crazy, misguided, frantic plan had worked. Juyeon, now eight, was reunited with one of his brothers. Everyone's emotions were in overdrive in their house for a week. Yerim decided she would make a cake and made a mess of their kitchen. (This was expected given that Yerim was five. It was still hell on ice to clean up.)

 

Hyunjoon was a few years later. A few years and seven entirely legal children later, to be exact, with the havoc-wreaking twins Jiwoo and Jungeun coming and going somewhere in between.

 

Sangyeon and Jacob both were excited to have a house with some semblance of peace and quiet. Of course, with seven boys between the ages of eight and eleven, that's not exactly a possibility… but at least they didn't have kindergartner Yujin anymore.

 

Hyunjoon was quieter than some of their other kids, he got on well with everyone, and he wasn't at all squicked out by their pet octopus Hyuksoo. A perfect fit. He'd come to them in the rain, soaking wet, recently removed from his father's house, hiding behind Jinsol and clinging to the standard-issue trash bag that held his belongings. 

 

"I didn't have an umbrella," Jinsol smiled sheepishly. "Give him a warm shower as an apology? From me?" 

 

Jacob, who'd opened the door for them, rolled his eyes and placed a hand on Hyunjoon's skinny back, walking him up to the bedrooms.

 

And then they were ten, and it was fine, but really it wasn't because Juyeon and Jaehyun still didn't have Younghoon with them. 

 

Their other kids hadn't had siblings, at least not the ones that they'd kept - Yena had eventually gone into her brother's custody, and Minju had a sister floating around somewhere - well, Kevin had stepsiblings, but they were back in Canada; anyway, it was only a concern for Juyeon and Jaehyun. 

 

The day Younghoon came, finally, was an interesting one. They'd seen Chaewon out of the house that morning, going finally to a permanent family, and Jacob and Eric were still teary. Then, the first loops of Ed Sheeran's Shape Of You started blaring from Jacob's phone. He startled and picked it up. 

 

"Hello?... Kahei, yes… no, we do, it was this morning… We'll say that we're fine. What's his name?... oh… yes, by tonight. Thanks so much… No, seriously, you don't even know… thanks again. See you then."

 

Then, Jacob's eyes had gotten very wide. He reached over and started punching Sangyeon. "Sangyeon - hyung - Juyeon - Sangyeon hyung - Kahei - Jaehyun - I -  _ Younghoon _ !"

 

Sangyeon had blinked. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" 

 

And thus they acquired Younghoon. 

 

The story, by all accounts, should have ended there. But that night, Sangyeon's phone buzzed at around four in the morning. He rolled out of bed, vaguely registered the insistent rapping at the front door, and sleepily fumbled down the stairs to open it. 

 

Miyu stood before him, hair pulled into a harsh ponytail, eyebrows furrowed. Just behind her was a boy, maybe Juyeon's age - twelve - shivering in the nighttime November cold and refusing to look either of the adults in the eye. 

 

"I know - I know it's late - early?" apologized Miyu profusely, "and that you just got someone new in today. But - well, this is sort of an emergency, so, uh - do you have room for one more?" 

 

Sangyeon smiled gently at the boy. At Chanhee. Skinny and scared but still hanging on.

 

"Always," he told Miyu. 

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to ted, milo, and kira for entertaining my fantasies about this, especially ted because we watched all of flower snack at 11pm at night over the course of four days-ish
> 
> it's my birthday and i banged out nearly half of this in the past couple hours just so i could post it today 
> 
> find me on twitter at somjichaeng or tumblr at zhengkis!


End file.
